Compatibility

Bitcoin Core is extensively tested on multiple operating systems using
the Linux kernel, macOS 10.8+, and Windows Vista and later.

Microsoft ended support for Windows XP on April 8th,
2014,
No attempt is made to prevent installing or running the software on Windows XP,
you can still do so at your own risk but be aware that there are known
instabilities and issues. Please do not report issues about Windows XP to the
issue tracker.

Bitcoin Core should also work on most other Unix-like systems but is not
frequently tested on them.

Notable changes

RPC changes

The first positional argument of createrawtransaction was renamed from
transactions to inputs.

The argument of disconnectnode was renamed from node to address.

These interface changes break compatibility with 0.14.0, when the named
arguments functionality, introduced in 0.14.0, is used. Client software
using these calls with named arguments needs to be updated.

Mining

In previous versions, getblocktemplate required segwit support from downstream
clients/miners once the feature activated on the network. In this version, it
now supports non-segwit clients even after activation, by removing all segwit
transactions from the returned block template. This allows non-segwit miners to
continue functioning correctly even after segwit has activated.

Due to the limitations in previous versions, getblocktemplate also recommended
non-segwit clients to not signal for the segwit version-bit. Since this is no
longer an issue, getblocktemplate now always recommends signalling segwit for
all miners. This is safe because ability to enforce the rule is the only
required criteria for safe activation, not actually producing segwit-enabled
blocks.

UTXO memory accounting

Memory usage for the UTXO cache is being calculated more accurately, so that
the configured limit (-dbcache) will be respected when memory usage peaks
during cache flushes. The memory accounting in prior releases is estimated to
only account for half the actual peak utilization.

The default -dbcache has also been changed in this release to 450MiB. Users
who currently set -dbcache to a high value (e.g. to keep the UTXO more fully
cached in memory) should consider increasing this setting in order to achieve
the same cache performance as prior releases. Users on low-memory systems
(such as systems with 1GB or less) should consider specifying a lower value for
this parameter.

0.14.1 Change log

Detailed release notes follow. This overview includes changes that affect
behavior, not code moves, refactors and string updates. For convenience in locating
the code changes and accompanying discussion, both the pull request and
git merge commit are mentioned.

RPC and other APIs

#10084 142fbb2 Rename first named arg of createrawtransaction (MarcoFalke)